Forget the Presidency

I’m not sure why everyone has such a hard-on about the upcoming presidential election and whether the President gets to keep his job, or not. In my humble opinion, the whole thing is a wash. It’s the congressional elections that matter even more.

Why?

Let’s go back to Bill Clinton’s Administration and the claims by Democrats that he handed George W. Bush a budget surplus and a vibrant economy that he promptly set about ruining. For starters, the economy during the 1990’s may have started out as showing great promise, but quickly turned into another bubble, courtesy of the Federal Reserve and unrealistically low lending rates, but that’s another story for another day.

At the end of the Cold War, it became apparent that we no longer needed a large military and that our defense industrial base was far too large to be sustainable, given the fact that everyone was looking for some sort of “peace dividend” that could be plowed back into other sectors of the federal government. Defense programs were terminated wholesale by then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney. Corporations who had invested large sums in technologies that were supposed to give us an edge over the Soviets had to find new ways to parlay those investments into something that would, at the very least, stem the flow of red ink they were experiencing as a result their programs undergoing the budget axe.

Although PC’s had been around since the mid to late 1980’s, they lacked the sort of ubiquity that video gaming consoles enjoyed during the same timeframe. Enter the high technology companies, who were now seeking to spinoff advances that would have gone into military systems. From a machine that had been mostly a tool for large corporations, government agencies, educational institutions, and hobbyists, we now had a multipurpose device that was ready for primetime. We watched the internet morph from something that had been set up as a means of being able to exchange information in a doomsday scenario, into a method of connecting anyone with a computer to a counterpart anywhere in the world, a neural network for the planet, if you will. It’s against this backdrop that you had a slew of companies come into being almost overnight: the internet and tech startups.

As we were ushering in a new age of prosperity in this country, we were also witnessing a change in control of the House from the Democrats to the Republicans after nearly four decades of one party rule. Part of the appeal of the Republicans being swept into office was a promise to bring smaller, more responsible, more effective government back to Washington as evidenced in their Contract with America. Despite the acrimony that may have developed between the two parties as a result of Speaker Gingrich’s leadership, Bill Clinton, however reluctant he may have been to go along with the legislation that was put on his desk for signature, became the recipient of quite a bit of “political capital” and goodwill among the American people. After all, we were in the midst of a period of incredible economic prosperity.

The 2012 election cycle will be an amalgam of three different electoral periods from what I can piece together. You have a repeat of 1980 with a weak president who has yet to have a single legislative, domestic, or foreign policy success (neither Obama-Care, nor killing Bin Laden and al Awlaki don’t count), and who seems to be foundering in the middle of a flatlining economic recovery. Next, you have the 1996 election, where there is no one on the Republican side of the aisle who can mount a decent enough challenge to the president to unseat him. Finally, there’s the 1994 congressional election which is where the Contract with America made its debut.

The House, even going back to Reconstruction, has always been the home to the more radical elements within our governmental structure. So it should come as no surprise to anyone who follows the goings on in Washington, why there is such a chasm between what the President wants and what a Republican controlled House wants. During a normal election cycle, one third of the Senate plus, all of the House members are up for re-election. Doing the math on this, we find that 2/3rds, or approximately 66 percent of the entire Congress can be replaced in one fell swoop. If you are a Republican, you would have to like those odds, knowing that your party may be able to gain a majority in the Senate and increase what you already have in the House.

Now I’m not much of a betting man, but if I was going to stake a wager, it would be on the Republicans claiming both houses of Congress, but not the presidency. If history is any indicator of why this a better option, one only has to look at the first two years of the current administration and the first two years of the second term of George W. Bush. Simply stated, single party rule throughout both branches, has failed this country miserably. An added benefit of having the loyal opposition in control of Congress is that it helps to keep an imperial presidency in check, and after the last ten years, I think that is a much needed thing.

I’ve only heard one talking head mention this in any sort of positive or constructive manner, the rest have been focused on the primaries, but then again, what do you expect from folks who claim to be the so called “experts”? Go figure.